Can't Get No Respect

So much for success on the BBQ circuit.

Fewer Canadians are satisfied with their prime minister, according to a poll by Angus Reid Strategies. 29 per cent of respondents approve of Stephen Harper’s performance, and 28 per cent say their opinion of the head of government worsened over the past month.

Do you approve or disapprove of Stephen Harper’s performance as prime minister?

	Jul. 16	Jun. 16	May 23
Approve	29%	31%	33%
Disapprove	47%	47%	47%
Not sure	23%	23%	20%

Of course when you do this don't expect to get any respect.

Journalists booted from Tory retreat

Or better poll numbers.

Political stalemate continues, latest poll shows

Wright said the government should rethink its strategy of tightly controlling its message, agenda, and delivery, which is almost exclusively done by Prime Minister Harper, who has been widely criticized for running a one-man show.

“It will really take the prime minister to decide whether he is going to stick by this style of leadership or if he is going to try something different,” said Wright.

SEE:

Slap Upside The Head

Pinocchio Harper

Open, Transparent, Accountable, NOT

Harpers Fascism

Fete Accompli

Ding Dong Tories

Harpers Constituency

Harpers War

Leo Strauss and the Calgary School

Post Modern Conservatives

Why The Conservatives Are Not Libertarians

Heil Hillier, Maintiens le droit

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Tories Leaky Ship of State

The Conservative governments embrace of the hard right statism of Law and Order, Militarism and an autocratic PMO is okay with their base.

What has p.o. some of their more vocal and organized social conservative supporters, in Alberta and Southern Ontario, is their embracing the dillitante green liberalism of Ottawa.

Can you say R E F O R M.

Somewhere in Kingston Saturday, a small group of disaffected Conservatives will meet to discuss what would have been unfathomable in the heady days that followed the last federal election: refounding the Reform Party.

Organizers say they have room for just 30 people, but that this weekend's event is a mere prelude to a much larger meeting later this month.

“It's now or never,” the online invitation says. “This new party will never be infiltrated by Red Tories, special interest groups or Quebec again.”

In another part of the country, Link Byfield is writing columns for his Citizens Centre for Freedom and Democracy that criticize the policies of the federal Conservatives.

“Has Stephen Harper been ‘Otta-washed?'” Mr. Byfield, a strong voice for small-c conservative Alberta, wrote on April 5. He went on to decry the March budget as a “massive spending splurge two or three times the rate of inflation [that] clomps big Liberal boots into all kinds of provincial responsibilities.”

When the Conservatives were elected in January, 2006, the former Reformers were jubilant at the thought of finally having a voice in Ottawa. But after a series of centrist decisions by Mr. Harper, they are again lamenting their disenfranchisement.

Thousands of supporters of Danny Williams hold rally to attack Harper

CanWest News Service

Published: Saturday, May 12, 2007

Several thousand angry Newfoundlanders massed on the steps of their legislature yesterday to attack Prime Minister Stephen Harper over changes to the equalization formula. Rally participants -- estimated at 3,000 -- vowed to stand behind Premier Danny Williams, pictured, in his public feud with Ottawa over a decision that could cost the provincial treasury $11-billion. Judy Hurley, who was at the rally, said she felt betrayed by the Prime Minister's decision to exclude all non-renewable resource revenue from the equalization formula. "I trusted Harper. Even when people said he couldn't be trusted, I gave him a chance," she said. "I'm disgusted."

H/T to Liberal Catnip

See:

Harpers Fascism

Leo Strauss and the Calgary School

Post Modern Conservatives.

Why The Conservatives Are Not Libertarians

Liberals The New PC's

Trotsky on Harper

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ethics, accountability, autarch, autocrat, politics,

We Are Not Crooks

Now here is a stunning bit of logic from our law and order government in Ottawa.

It reminds me of Richard Nixon's famous quote; "I Am Not A Crook."

As we all know innocent people have nothing to hide.

An official from the Prime Minister's Office recently followed a journalist off Parliament Hill, then approached the reporter to challenge a story about the PMO's refusal to disclose how Harper's travelling hairdresser is being paid.

The official told the reporter three times that accountability measures are for crooks, not honest people.

It appears to be a theme in the Harper government.

While stressing the need for clear rules and transparency for others, the cabinet continues to tightly control information, censor documents and only selectively disclose ministerial expenses.

See:

Harpers Fascism

Leo Strauss and the Calgary School

Post Modern Conservatives.

Why The Conservatives Are Not Libertarians

Liberals The New PC's

Trotsky on Harper

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ethics, accountability, autarch, autocrat, politics,

Harpers Fascism

Being an autocratic PM is not enough for Stephen Harper, he is now promoting narrow reactionary nationalism in Quebec, coming as he does from the reactionary rural based Reform Party of Alberta, which originated out of the Social Credit party,

This of course is the classic basis for fascism, the petit-bourgeoisie and farmers which coincidentally populate the racist populist 'third way' ADQ.

Instead, the prime minister chose to brandish his credentials as a Quebec nationalist, hoping to make further inroads in a province that is central to Tory efforts to turn their minority government into majority. "There is nothing more precious than the family farm, which represents so well all the values on which our country has been built,'' he said to rapturous applause.

Modern fascism promotes itself as 'the third way" as does Harper and the ADQ when they speak of their third way as Quebec Nationalists.

Apparently, the CPC believe that there is a "third way" between what they call "Liberal" federalism and Bloc Quebecois separatism. This is Conservative Quebec nationalism.

The Harper regime is a classic case of modern fascism, embraced by the neo-cons in their promotion of Machiavellian politics in reaction to Stalinism and the left.

More broadly, fascism may be defined as any totalitarian regime which does not aim at the nationalization of industry but preserves at least nominal private property. The term can even be extended to any dictatorship that has become unfashionable among intellectuals.

Fascists were radical modernizers. By temperament they were neither conservative nor reactionary. Fascists despised the status quo and were not attracted by a return to bygone conditions. Even in power, despite all its adaptations to the requirements of the immediate situation, and despite its incorporation of more conservative social elements, Fascism remained a conscious force for modernization.

In Fascism's early days it encompassed an element of what was called "liberism," the view that capitalism and the free market ought to be left intact, that it was sheer folly for the state to involve itself in "production."


The fascist moral ideal, upheld by writers from Sorel to Gentile, is something like an inversion of the caricature of a Benthamite liberal. The fascist ideal man is not cautious but brave, not calculating but resolute, not sentimental but ruthless, not preoccupied with personal advantage but fighting for ideals, not seeking comfort but experiencing life intensely. The early Fascists did not know how they would install the social order which would create this "new man," but they were convinced that they had to destroy the bourgeois liberal order which had created his opposite.

JSTOR: Italian Fascism and the Aesthetics of the 'Third Way'

See:

Leo Strauss and the Calgary School

Post Modern Conservatives.

Why The Conservatives Are Not Libertarians

Heil Hillier, Maintiens le droit

White Multiculturalism

The New Conservative Racism

Shameless

Stephen Harper

Autarky

Autarch


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The Tories Two Solitudes

Harper touts his 'open federalism' approach

Prime Minister Stephen Harper championed his "open'' brand of federalism in Quebec's rural heartland Saturday night, finding an echo in the province's newly emboldened autonomists.

Harper -- speaking exclusively in French -- painted himself as a defender of the Quebec nation, and the federal leader best positioned to fight the province's separatist forces.

"When you are a nation, it is perfectly natural to be a nationalist,'' he told a crowd of more than 400 people gathered in the community centre of this farming town south of Quebec City.

MP decries hiring of unilingual anglophone as ombudsman for victims of crime

A New Democrat MP says the appointment of a unilingual anglophone to a federal ombudsman's office is illegal.

New Brunswick MP Yvon Godin said Friday the hiring of Steve Sullivan, the first federal ombudsman for victims of crime, violates public employment laws.

The Acadie-Bathurst MP also said Sullivan's hiring is "immoral" because he can't represent francophones adequately.

"The victims will finally have an ombudsman to file a complaint, but the entire Canadian francophone community can't speak to him," said Godin.

"It doesn't make any sense, absolutely no sense."

Harpers recent pronouncements are further evidence of the correctness of my analysis of the Tories two solitudes policy; recognizing the unilingual natures of Quebec and the Rest of Canada. An attack on Canada's bilingualism and multiculturalism, which the right wing has opposed since Trudeau was PM.

Leo Strauss and the Calgary School

Harper, unlike Preston Manning, was a student of the Calgary School. Harper's political practice is influenced more by this than Manning was. Hence Harpers surprise; the recognition of Quebec as a nation, giving it the separatism it wants within a decentralized federal state. That is more the nuanced politics of the Calgary School than the Reform Party demand that the West Wants In. The old anti-bilingualism of the Reformers is replaced with the subtle Two Distinct Languages policy of the Conservatives. Which again appeals to Quebecois nationalism, while also keeping the rest of Canada happy with one language; English.

The Language Of Racism

The Conservatives are promoting two Canadian languages, not bilingualism and bi-culturalism, since that is a Liberal bugaboo, a much hated left over of the Trudeau era. The Harper Conservatives roots are in the old Social Credit party of Alberta, both provincial and Federal, the Reform party and its links to the reactionary right wing I spoke of earlier. They are willing to accept two language groups in Canada, as long as they are unilingual. They have always opposed multiculturalism and bilingualism.

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Link Byfield's New Party

Living off the avails of his Citizens Centre for Freedom and Democracy, which arose from the corpse of the politically and fiscally bankrupt Alberta Report, Link Byfield has decided that being an elected Senator in Waiting is not enough. So he and some pals have formed a new Right Wing Rump Party.

Whats interesting is that all these neo-con wannabe Reform Parties in Alberta seem to come from or originate in Calgary. The largest American city north of the 49th parallel. Which explains their Republican agenda.

A Canadian development without a direct parallel in Australia was the key role
played by “Calgary School” political scientists in new right party politics and freemarket think tanks like the Fraser Institute. In Australia a number of economists have played a prominent role in promoting public choice frames of analysis, but largely via think tanks rather than through direct involvement in party politics.

Members of the Calgary School reproduce the main features of US right-wing
anti-elite discourse, including a contrast between elite fashions and mainstream
traditional values, a campaign against the tyranny of political correctness, and an
attack on self-styled equality seekers—feminists, anti-poverty groups, the gayrightsmovement, natives and other ethnic and racial minorities.

To be honest they should quit calling themselves Albertans or Party of Alberta and call themselves what they are; the Calgary Republican Lobby. Since many of them believe Ronald Reagan Was Better Than Trudeau.

Background of Albertans

Many Albertans have immigrated from the United States. The energy industry, as well as the ranching industry, has attracted many Americans. Attacking Americans attacks the family background of many Albertans. Prominent Albertans have American roots. Senator Ted Morton is originally from California. MP Myron Thompson is from the U.S..

Their appeal is limited to the Americanized Albertans who live in Southern Alberta. So they don't even appeal to the Lougheed liberals who made the PC's the Party of Calgary. And they don't appeal to urban voters.

And they certainly don't appeal to Northern Albertans who make Redmonton their capital.




SEE:

Not Before Alberta Votes

Link Byfield Goes AA

Mr Harper Forgets Redmonton

Leo Strauss and the Calgary School

Mormonism Cult of the Political Right

Creationism Is Not Science

Reform Party of Alberta

Return of the Socreds

Aboriginal Property Rights

Shop Keepers Liberty

Alberta Separatism Not Quite Stamped Out

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America's foreign critics are unflattering, unfair, and worth hearing


Samuel Goldman, National correspondent
Wed, October 20, 2021


Wang Huning. Illustrated | Getty Images, iStock

Americans like to be praised. When the French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in the early 19th century, he noted his hosts expected to be admired the way court poets apotheosized European monarchs. Because "the majority lives in perpetual self-adoration," Tocqueville observed, "there are certain truths that only foreigners or experience can bring to American ears."

Tocqueville brought some of those truths to light. Though remembered as an admirer of American democracy, Tocqueville was dismayed by individualist, commercialist, and conformist tendencies. He's still the best-known in a long string of foreign critics of the United States, intellectuals whose judgment of the U.S. can be uniquely instructive, especially when it's unflattering.

Tocqueville's ambivalence was echoed by other "friendly critics" described by Williams College sociologist James L. Nolan, Jr. in his 2016 book What They Saw in America. Looking beyond judicious admirers, however, Nolan considers the harsher assessment of visitors including the Egyptian Islamist theorist Sayyid Qutb, who studied in the U.S. in the 1950s. Where Tocqueville thought Americans' virtues outweighed our vices, Qutb depicted Americans as facile barbarians who threatened everything that makes life worth living.

After 9/11, there was a surge of attention to Qutb, who was considered the intellectual mastermind of al Qaeda. That interest has since receded along with the ostensible Islamist threat, but a new chief intellectual challenger to the American way of life has emerged. That challenger is Wang Huning, a secretive Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official whom some scholars have dubbed the "hidden ruler" of modern China.

Like many of his predecessors, Wang's criticisms of American life reflect the disappointment of a young idealist. A full professor at just 30, Wang was invited to visit the United States by the American Political Science Association in 1988. His experiences over six months form the basis of America against America, now a valuable collectors' item.

America against America is more than a travelogue. The title alludes to two tensions at the level of ideas. The first contrasts false images of America prevalent among Chinese intellectuals. The actual United States, Wang insisted, was neither the exploitative tyranny envisioned by older Marxists nor the utopia of freedom envisioned by young liberals. Instead, it was a complicated society where wealth and poverty, high technology and primitive beliefs, hierarchy and equality were constantly juxtaposed.

The title's second meaning addresses those internal contrasts. Borrowing a concept from the political scientist Samuel Huntington, Wang argued that American politics is driven by tension between an ideological creed and actual practice. Unlike societies that enjoy greater balance between self-perception and reality, such as Japan, America was trapped in a "unstoppable undercurrent of crisis."

In his influential essay, "The Structure of China's Changing Political Culture," Wang emphasizes resources and requirements of Chinese culture that might help China escape that undercurrent. That emphasis on cultural autonomy helped launch Wang's career in the CCP, where he has apparently survived many ideological changes of fashion.

But it's a mistake to see Wang as the product of a radically different intellectual tradition: His ideas are as much products of Western modernity as they are criticisms of it. Indeed, Wang's reliance on American self-critique is clear in America against America. In addition to his own observations while visiting in the late 1980s, Wang draws on U.S. political science and political theory of the period. His sources include Allan Bloom, whose diagnosis of nihilism was heavily influenced by the émigré philosopher Leo Strauss.

Published in 1991, Wang's meditation on decline in America against America was untimely. Evading rivalry with Japan, which was then widely anticipated, the United States went on to enjoy several more decades of economic and military hegemony. That reprieve may not have fooled Chinese authorities, whom Wang has counseled to look beyond short-term events, but it did leave American audiences less inclined to heed foreign warnings about domestic decay.

The reception is changing, though. A sympathetic profile in Palladium this month marks Wang's rediscovery as a kind of cult figure in certain quarters of the intellectual right. For these readers, Wang's interest isn't limited to his ostensible influence over the Chinese leadership. Like the chain of foreign observers extending back to Tocqueville and beyond, he's an outsider uniquely positioned to tell us the ugly truth about ourselves.

How accurate is that assessment? One reason it's difficult to say is that Wang apparently refuses to speak to foreigners and no longer publishes or conducts public events even in China. As a result, little of his work is available in English. Like Qutb, whose publications were both linguistically and intellectually inaccessible to all but a tiny number of Western readers, Wang's reputation benefits from a very unAmerican sense of mystery.

What of his work we do have is about 30 years old and partly in amateur translation. Stylistic infelicities aside, Wang's observations are not groundbreaking. A domestic critic with the same insights wouldn't receive the same interest. Wang's close attention to historical observers like Tocqueville and the German sociologist Max Weber, as well as contemporary neoconservatives, give America against America a somewhat derivative quality. He reports that American accept gross urban squalor, are obsessed with psychological wellbeing, and haven't figured out how to reconcile the promise of civic equality with the history of slavery and discrimination. None of this is exactly new.

Still, that's not reason to dismiss him. If people keep telling you that you have a stain on your shirt, you probably do. The great service of foreign observers like Wang has been to puncture Americans' widely recognized tendency to assume that we live in the best of all possible countries.

But there's also reason to be skeptical of the dire conclusions Wang draws. Like the friendly and not-so-friendly critics on whom he draws, Wang is convinced that liberal democracy stands on the precipice of collapse, and that only a powerful infusion of non-liberal values from the distant past can possibly save us from ourselves.

That may indeed be the case. But the fact that versions of the same diagnosis can be found among anti-liberal theorists all the way back to the foundation of the republic gives reason to doubt the situation is quite so dire. In retrospect, many of the developments foreign critics saw as symptoms of profound degeneration seem laughably quaint. Qutb was famously incensed by a church dance in Greeley, Colorado.

There may be a way to combine a more optimistic assessment of American prospects with Wang's analysis, though. Like Tocqueville, Wang wasn't writing about America for the benefits Americans. Instead, he was writing for his countrymen, who were inclined either to be unrealistically positive or unjustifiably negative about the country that has symbolized the modern world for more than two centuries. For them, Wang's message is simply: There's both good and bad in America, and America's good and bad are both very different from China.

That remains a valuable warning against the naive universalism in the idea that history is inexorably marching toward the triumph of U.S.-style democracy. China is not America and must find her own political, cultural, and economic destiny. So must other nations, including those in which the U.S. nation-building efforts have lately gone awry.

Yet Wang's new admirers should also keep the corollary in mind: America is not China, and there is a limit to the lessons we can derive from a great but very different civilization. America's friendly critics have never been impressed by the sophistication of American arts, the quality of American governance, or the power of American social cohesion. Instead, they've seen American greatness in individual freedom, unconstrained possibility, and an optimistic attitude toward the future.

Those characteristics certainly carry risks, including a recurring experience of crisis. But we won't find success in our rivalry with China — or anywhere else — by rejecting them.

America Against America : Wang Huning : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

America Against America by Wang Huning

Publication date 1991Topics communism, marxism-leninism, PRC, china, america, US, united statesCollection opensource

Translated with DeepL software. There are some errors but it is mostly intelligible.

From the uploader at /leftypol/:

"He [Wang] was a professor of international relations at Fudan University in Shanghai where he gained the attention of allies of Jiang Zemin in the 1990s. In 2002, he headed the very important Central Policy Research Office and joined the Politburo Standing Committee – the CPC's top decision-making body – in 2017. He is widely regarded by outside observers as one of the most influential theorists in the country, which de facto makes him one of the most influential theorists in the world.

He has written several books, including National Sovereignty (1987), Comparative Political Analysis (1987), An Analysis of Contemporary Western Political Science (1987), Fighting Corruption: China's Experiment (1990), and co-edited books such as Logic of Politics: Marxist Principles of Political Science (1989). His advisor at Fudan University before he became a professor was Chen Qiren, an authority on Marx's works and Das Kapital. Wang's thesis was titled, "From Bodin to Maritain: On Sovereignty Theories Developed by the Western Bourgeoisie." His book National Sovereignty is a historical survey of the concept, tying it in with Marxist-Leninist concepts of national equality and self-determination.

The book covers a wide range of topics regarding the United States ranging from his observations about: Manhattan, Chinatown, "the heights of commodification," the Amish and the Amana colonies and the decline of farming; the American political spirit and the American national character, the space shuttle program, and America's "multileveled social control" system which includes the "invisible hand" and the "money-managed society," the legal culture and taxation system and its scientific administrators. There is a chapter of "interwoven political power" which he called the "rule of donkey and elephant," the party share-spoiling system, lobbyists, radical organizations and the contradiction between pluralism and meritocracy.

He spends a chapter on the 1988 presidential election, and spends another chapter on the "political pyramid" from Congress to the states to county politics. That is followed by a chapters on "soft governance" and "reproducing the system" which covers driver's licenses, workplace principles ("a company is not a democracy"), a visit to the Coca-Cola headquarters, and sections on the education system, MIT, the Kennedy School of Government, the U.S. Naval Academy, etc.

Lastly, there is a chapter on "active intelligence" (think tanks) and "hidden crises." This last chapters covers family values, wandering youths, the criminal underworld, beggars, racism against black people and Native Americans, and whether America is facing a looming "spiritual crisis" of values."

Wang Huning - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Huning

Wang Huning (Chinese: 王沪宁; born October 6, 1955) is a leading political theorist since the 1990s and one of the top leaders of the Communist Party of China, a current member of the party's Politburo Standing Committee (China's top decision-making body) and first-ranked secretary of the party's Secretariat. He served as the head of the Central Policy Research Office from 2002 to 2020 and as a secretary of the Secretariat between 2007 and 2012. He was named director of Central Guidance Commission on Building Spiritual Civilization in November 2017. Widely regarded as Xi Jinping's "Grey Cardinal" or the Mikhail Suslov of China, Wang is believed to be the chief ideologue of the Communist Party and principal architect behind the official political ideologies of three paramount leaders: "Three Represents" by Jiang Zemin, the Scientific Development Concept by Hu Jintao, and the Chinese Dream and Xi Jinping Thought of Xi Jinping. He has held significant influence over policy and decision making over all three paramount leaders and is currently regarded, along with Wang Qishan, as one of the two primary advisors and decision makers for Xi Jinpi

The Father of the Neo-Cons Dies

William F. Buckley passed away late last month. And in his passing the liberal media myth that he was the 'public intellectual of American Conservatism', continues. The laudatory obits forget top mention he was not a public intellectual but a scion of Big Oil, with aristocratic pretensions which were mistaken for intellectualism.

His Catholicism was a pining for the old world, Old Europe and its pre-revolutionary, pre-modernist, social order. On the other hand those on the far right knew him for what he was as this John Birch Society obituary reveals;

The fact of the matter is that Buckley, far from being the father of anything resembling true conservatism (as best exemplified by Senator Robert Taft, who was denied the Republican nomination in 1952 by Buckley's philosophical brethren), was merely a very capable quarterback for a team of neoconservatives (neocons) who had graduated from the World War II-era OSS into the CIA, bringing their anti-Stalinist, but definitely Trotskyite, ideas with them. The repackaging of this anti-American philosophy as "neoconservatism" rivaled any campaign Madison Avenue ever concocted for a "new" detergent that would get your clothes whiter and brighter.

The original OSS/CIA neocons, including the aforementioned Willmoore Kendall, spotted young Bill Buckley when he was on the staff of the Yale Daily News, and tagged him as a likely rising star of their movement. (Buckley, of course, was also tapped to join the secretive Skull and Bones society while at Yale, as had both presidents Bush and Senator John Kerry.) At Kendall's urging, Buckley joined the CIA after graduating from Yale. Through Kendall, Buckley became acquainted with James Burnham, another OSS/CIA veteran who would become a prominent figure at National Review. So strong was the CIA connection that the brilliant economist and former contributor to Buckley's magazine, Murray Rothbard, said in 1981: "I'm convinced that the whole National Review is a CIA operation."

He his lauded for his debating skills, the laconic eyebrow that would rise, the Bostonian drawl all a pretense aimed at creating the illusion that he was the master debater. Like his Catholicism, it was all for show.


Buckely's Firing Line was the model for later public affairs debate shows like Cross Fire. However unlike Firing Line these later versions simply declined into shouting matches. Despite the pretenses and his dismissive attitude towards opponents Buckley at least used reason in his debates with opponents. The new turks of the neo-con establishment have adopted his dismissive style, but added shouting and rank rhetoric to make their points.

He was perhaps the last real American voice of the neo-con right in America, having been replaced by ex pat Canadians like Charles Krauthammer and David Frum. Ironic that the new spokesmen for the American right are ex-Canadians.
They of course moved south because the right in Canada is not the mainstream of our body politic (which is social democratic an anathema that Frum and Krauthammer revile) as it is in America. The other irony is that the Buckley neo-con establishment has replaced the Democrat establishment as the voice of the American Empire.

And this right wing voice of the American Empire has its echo chamber in Canada, it is the core of the Harper Conservative Party. In fact one can find a little Buckley in the imperious and dismissive attitude of our autarkic PM.

SEE:

The Fifth International

Leo Strauss and the Calgary School

Post Modern Conservatives

Why The Conservatives Are Not Libertarians


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Stephen Harper, William F. Buckley, Firing Line, Conservative Party, politics, philosophy, obituary,

Two ‘Leftist Bros’ Dive Into Conservatism to ‘Know Your Enemy’

The podcast hosted by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell offers history lessons that middle-aged liberals, young socialists and even some conservatives can love.


Sam Adler-Bell, left, and Matthew Sitman are the hosts of the podcast “Know Your Enemy,” which bills itself as “the leftist’s guide to the conservative movement.”

Credit...Zack DeZon for The New York Times

LONG READ

By Jennifer Schuessler
March 7, 2022

When Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell sat down in the spring of 2019 to start the podcast “Know Your Enemy,” all they had was a microphone, a cheeky title and the vague hope that “yet another podcast where two leftist bros guide you through the swampy morass of the American right,” as they put it, might be something other people would actually listen to.

“We had no idea what we were doing,” Adler-Bell, 31, said during an interview last month in Sitman’s apartment in Manhattan, groaning at the mention of that first episode, which featured plenty of awkward fumbling and jokes about Sitman’s Leo Strauss tattoos.

Sitman, 40, a self-described “recovered conservative” (with no tattoos), offered a somewhat more charitable take.

“We just love talking to each other,” he said.

Nearly three years and 100 episodes later, “Know Your Enemy” has moved from being a cult favorite to something of a must-listen for the sort of person who is as interested in the internal politics of National Review, circa 1957, as in the current jousting on Capitol Hill.

The podcast contextualizes today’s hot-button debates like the battles over critical race theory in schools. But it mostly offers deep dives into conservative intellectual history, going into the weeds of the weeds armed with reading lists, reams of footnotes and archival documents.

Its audience of roughly 25,000 to 50,000 listeners per episode (according to the hosts) may be tiny by the standards of Joe Rogan, or even the socialist podcast “Chapo Trap House.” But in our hyper-polarized times, “Know Your Enemy” has emerged as something middle-aged liberals, young democratic socialists and Gen Z conservatives hungry for deeper perspective on the tumult of the Trump era can all love.

Sitman, who grew up in a working-class fundamentalist Baptist family, is an ex-conservative, but not an “embittered” one, he emphasizes.

Credit...Zack DeZon for The New York Times

The hosts “have read more conservative political theory than most conservatives,” one admirer on the right said.

Credit...Zack DeZon for The New York Times


“They really do their homework,” said Nate Hochman, a 23-year-old writer for National Review who described himself as fan “before it was cool.” “They’ve read more conservative political theory than most conservatives.”

While “enemy” may give the title its juice, the operative word is “know” — and, possibly, emulate?

Young progressives “don’t understand why the right keeps winning,” said Sam Tanenhaus, a former editor of The New York Times Book Review who is working on a biography of William F. Buckley.

“What Sam and Matt say is, look at it a different way,” Tanenhaus continued. “Don’t just see the right as the enemy, pure and simple. See them as brilliant — and maybe smarter than you are.”

The podcast began at a fortuitous moment in 2019. Early salvos in the fractious (and hard-to-decipher) debate between the conservative writers David French and Sohrab Ahmari had started lighting up the conservative pundit-sphere, and the first National Conservatism Conference, where a Who’s Who of the right tried to hash out an ideologically coherent version of Trumpism, was just a few months away.

The podcast helps progressives understand “why the right keeps winning,” said Sam Tanenhaus, the author of a forthcoming biography of William F. Buckley (shown here around 1958).

 Credit...Bettmann Archive, via Getty Images

“By that point, most of the magazines and think-tanks and funders on the right had started making the Trump pivot,” said Sitman, who is leaving his job at the liberal Roman Catholic magazine Commonweal later this month to write and podcast full time. “As the dust was settling, you could see where things were at.”

A few months in, the democratic socialist magazine Dissent became sponsors, as listenership steadily grew. (The podcast currently takes in about $17,000 month from subscribers, who sign up for tiers, ranging from “Young American for Freedom” to “Unreconstructed Monarchist.”) The “breakthrough,” Sitman said, came in January 2021, with an episode on the roiling debate over whether President Trump is a fascist.

The Jan. 6 insurrection, Sitman said, felt “very vindicating” of “the penchant for authoritarian minority rule” on the right, which the podcast had been noting from the beginning.

The (relative) calm of the first year of the Biden presidency created more room for scholarly explorations, like episodes on the friendship between Allan Bloom and Saul Bellow, and on Frank Meyer, the ex-Communist National Review editor and creator of “fusionism,” the marriage of free-market economics and social traditionalism that defined postwar conservatism.


The podcast takes deep dives into conservative intellectual history, exploring topics like the friendship between the novelist Saul Bellow (shown in 1977) and the philosopher Allan Bloom. 

Credit...Eddie Adams/Associated Press

And in a particularly head-snapping installment, the hosts, joined by Tanenhaus, examined the conservatism of Joan Didion, who contributed regularly to National Review early in her career (and who in 2001 wrote that she would have voted for Barry Goldwater in every election after 1964, if she’d had the chance).

Those biographical dives explore favorite “Know Your Enemy” themes of mentorship and friendship, conversions and trajectories, with a rich sense of psychology and literary surprise. Sitman likes to quote a former professor: “The relationship between gossip and philosophy is tenuous but real.”

As for his own trajectory, Sitman grew up in a working-class, fundamentalist Baptist family in central Pennsylvania, steeped in “God and guns conservatism,” as he put it in a 2016 essay. He graduated from a small Christian college, and after an internship at the Heritage Foundation, enrolled in graduate school at Georgetown, studying political theory with the conservative scholar George W. Carey.

What peeled him away from conservatism, starting in his mid-20s, he said, was disgust at conservatives’ support for torture, as well as growing embrace of class politics, which pulled him toward democratic socialism.

He converted to Catholicism in 2015. His faith, and the way he sees human vulnerability as central to politics, is a touchstone on the podcast.

“I feel guilty about making Sam learn so much about the Catholic Church,” Sitman said. Adler-Bell shot back: “I’m going to make you read Freud at some point.”

Adler-Bell, grew up in a progressive, secular Jewish family in Connecticut. He was active in a student-labor alliance while an undergraduate at Brown, and later worked at the advocacy group Demand Progress and interned at The Nation.

He said his immersion in conservative thought “defamiliarized the left,” forcing him to think harder about why he believed what he believed.

“A lot of people on the left only come into contact with the stupidest versions of right-wing arguments — the least sophisticated, the least interesting, the least literary,” he said.

On the podcast, and in person, Sitman has a genial professorial vibe, spiking his learned explications with anecdotes about prominent figures, some of whom he knew personally. Adler-Bell is saltier, always eager, as he half-jokingly puts it, to highlight the more “lurid and prurient” aspects of the right.



The podcast takes an unabashedly literary and intellectual approach. “A lot of people on the left only come into contact with the stupidest versions of right-wing arguments,” said Adler-Bell, who grew up in a left-wing family.

Credit...Zack DeZon for The New York Times

Sitman said the podcast has damaged some “already frayed” relationships with former mentors and friends. But he emphasized that, unlike some other apostates from the right, he wasn’t “embittered.”

“I am!” Adler-Bell interjected, slapping his knee. “That’s why it’s good to have me, an argumentative Jew.”

Not all conservative listeners are unqualified fans. Matthew Schmitz, 34, a columnist at The American Conservative and former senior editor at First Things, said Sitman and Adler-Bell were “extremely good at their jobs,” calling the podcast “better than almost anything on public radio.” That wasn’t entirely a compliment.

“‘Know Your Enemy’ falls into a kind of ideological orientalism, presenting right-wing ideas as a mélange of the backward, regressive and decadent,” he said.

Which brings up a still-unsettled question for the hosts: How much to talk with conservatives, as opposed to just talking about them?

So far, only a handful of “enemies” have appeared as guests, including Ross Douthat, an opinion columnist for The Times. All the conservative guests are “a little bit heterodox,” Sitman conceded. Adler-Bell added: “We have a ‘no hacks’ policy.”

Still, after an episode with Hochman (one of the young conservative radicals featured in a much-discussed recent article by Adler-Bell in The New Republic), some listeners wrote in with concerns the hosts had “platformed” him without pushing back hard enough.

The hosts say they thought they were tough, pressing him, for example, on the role of white racial backlash in fueling postwar conservatism. “We trust the intelligence of our listeners,” Sitman said. But they also acknowledged that, “as two white guys,” they are less likely to experience some things conservatives say as “deeply offensive or dehumanizing.”

Their goal isn’t any squishy mutual understanding or bipartisan compromise, but clarification — and the sheer pleasure of conversation. “It’s great to have a chance to talk to people you disagree with, without thinking the project is to find common ground,” Adler- Bell said.

Sitman, again hitting the more professorial note, paraphrased the British philosopher Michael Oakeshott, from his essay “On Being Conservative.”

“The point of going fishing isn’t to catch fish,” he said. “It’s to be out on the water.”

Jennifer Schuessler is a culture reporter covering intellectual life and the world of ideas. She is based in New York. @jennyschuessler